I suppose I’ll get drunk, which isn’t the same thing at all. And if I do, it’ll have to be on wine. I can’t afford anything classier. Not now.
July 11
I don’t feel any different, and if I looked in the mirror, which I have been gradually breaking myself of the habit of doing, I don’t suppose I would look any different either. But then neither did Dorian Gray.
I made forty-five dollars. One this afternoon for twenty-five, one this evening for twenty. (If you can’t get five, take two.)
There’s nothing to it.
Literally nothing to it. I never would have believed this. I would have believed almost anything else about prostitution — what a windy clinical word for the actual process — but I wouldn’t have believed it could be so, oh, what’s the word? Noninvolving?
That’s not exactly it. That was part of it, the feeling of this-person-he’s-fucking-is-not-the-real-me, and I suppose every girl has to feel that in order to keep from despising herself. And there is a certain amount of tripping out involved. I have always been good, perhaps too good, at being able to carry on a conversation, nodding in the right places, grunting uh-huh and mmmm and uh-uh, even contributing a phrase or a sentence now and then, without paying a dime’s worth of attention to what’s going on.
And you know, you can do this physically as well as verbally. It’s much the same thing, except it’s the body instead of the mind that is just going through the motions of participating.
I made forty-five dollars today. That’s at least twice as much as I could have made in any job I could have gotten, and in half the hours.
The sex part—
A flash. It was almost exactly the same as when I hit the hay with what’s-his-name, Edgar. The same thing! The same I’m-not-really-here, the same faint sense of contempt for the man I was with, the same general disinterest in what we were doing in bed, the same experience of getting a certain amount of pleasure from it but being too detached to really enjoy it, or even to really hate it, for that matter.
I don’t see why I can’t go on this way. It shouldn’t be too terribly hard to put away a hundred dollars a week. A hundred dollars is four or five tricks. (The New Math.) Four or five men a week and the rent is paid.
Went to the gay bar last night and got drunk. A little foggy on what happened, but I think I went home with a girl and I think we made it. I drank some wine before I went there, then had a bottle of cough syrup — terpin hydrate and codeine — you have to sign the book when you buy it and the druggist gives you an I-know-what-you-want-this-for-you-junkie-bitch look, but how else can you get high for seventy-nine cents?
Then all the drinks at the gay bar, which she bought for me, and whatever we had at her place. For all I know we had cocaine at her place. I really don’t remember. I have vague sex memories but they parallel a couple of freaky dreams I’ve been having lately, so who knows which was which?
The other thing, which I haven’t written about in here, and which I’m still not writing about because it scares me that much, hasn’t happened yet.
If it doesn’t happen soon I don’t know what I’ll do. Oh, well, I guess I can always kill myself.
The girl is not entirely kidding.
July 15
Still nothing.
What will I do? If Eric were around he would know what to do. I suppose he would help, but who knows? Who knows anything any more?
Maybe it will work out.
Except I know it won’t. I’ve never even worried about it before and this time I just knew.
It’s impossible. Everybody says it’s impossible. What do you do? Sue the manufacturer?
Except I probably forgot. I know I forget a lot of the time, I always have extras left over.
(Write it, you idiot! Go on!)
No, I can’t. I don’t want to. I guess I’ll go out and fuck somebody and make some money.
Yesterday I turned five tricks and all five of them wanted to be blown. All five. That was the only contact they wanted to have with me.
Why don’t they turn queer?
If I did nothing but that all the time I wouldn’t have this problem.
July 17
I was reading through this.
I’m really sick. Most of the time I don’t realize it. Or maybe I do deep down inside. All of that shit early on about making progress. Some kind of progress. The girl is going noisily out of her skull.
I have a feeling, too, that it’s not a good idea to drink cough syrup every day.
Fuck it. Maybe it’ll hurt the baby.
July 18
It really looked as though I would never write that last line. It’s funny because I’ve been able to put down almost everything else I’ve done, but now what I seem to be is pregnant — I’m never late, and God am I late now. And even now I can’t sit back and let myself gush about it. I’m really uptight about this. I’ve never been quite like this before.
Then again, I’ve never been pregnant before.
This isn’t supposed to happen to girls on the pill. Everybody said the pill would put abortionists out of business. What is it, some sort of mad suicidal or self-destructive streak in me? How can you run around the city fucking absolutely everybody and forget to take your pill first thing in the morning? And it isn’t as if I have such a full schedule that I can’t find time to take a birth control pill. It isn’t as though I have so many other vital things to remember that little trivial things like not getting pregnant are too much to remember.
As a matter of fact, there have been days when taking my pill was just about the only thing I did do. There were also days when it was one of many things I didn’t do. Which is why I am presently knocked up.
When Howie and I were trying to have a baby, nothing happened. The river flowed red like a clock. Red like a clock? What is the matter with me today? And what’s with cutesy little euphemisms for menstruating?
What do I do now?
Who do I know who would know where to go for an abortion? The funny thing is probably just about anybody. Of the old gang in Eastchester I’m sure there were a lot who went under the knife. If this had happened before I left Howard, I would just have asked Marcie. Nothing simpler. If she hadn’t had an abortion herself she would certainly know somebody who had, and it would all be very intelligently arranged, and it would cost whatever it is that they cost, which I guess is a thousand dollars (which means I could have afforded it if I hadn’t had the robbery, and of course people become paranoid, why shouldn’t people become paranoid, because it’s pretty obvious that the world is conspiring against me. I mean, how else would everything happen this way, as if on schedule? It can’t all be luck. Somebody up there hates me.)
The same question, over and over and over. What do I do now? I wish I knew the answer.
There’s not even any point in looking for an abortionist now because I don’t have any money to pay him with. The way things stand now I’ll have the rent when it’s due and probably a couple of hundred dollars beyond that, but I don’t know how long I can go before it’s too late to have the abortion.
Maybe I should have the baby.
Oh, that’s just what I need. And if worst comes to worst I can take it back to Howie. Here’s somebody’s baby to bring us back together again.
Solid.
July 24
Liz says she knows someone who will do it for three hundred dollars. She insists he’s reliable and that he operates under sanitary conditions. I hope so. I really don’t want to die. I’d rather have the baby than die.